Kenya Is On Call for Mobile Crowdsourcing

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA — Cellphone entrepreneur Nathan Eagle has most of Kenya on call, waiting for a small job. Millions of them, in fact.

Eagle, an MIT research scientist who has been living and teaching in East Africa since 2006, hopes to enlist cellphone users in developing countries to perform small text-based tasks in return for micro-payments. Think of it as the mobile phone equivalent of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which pays humans to do such things as transcribe audio and tag photos.

If successful, Txteagle could provide an important source of income to rural and low-income populations. What Eagle needs now is for companies in the West to figure out how to use this literate but underemployed mass of people to take care of tedious tasks that humans are better at than computers.

"We have transformed the majority of phones in East Africa into a platform that people can use to make money," Eagle told conference goers Tuesday at the O’Reilly Emerging Tech conference being held this week in San Jose, California. "There are 15 million Africans ready to start working on their mobile phones."

Mobile phones are the most-dominant modern technology in the developing world, and now the majority of cellphone subscribers live outside developed countries.

"This is their technology. The mobile phone is theirs," Eagle said. "It has had a far greater impact on their lives than it has on ours."

For instance, Safari Com in Kenya has a well-developed payment system called MPesa that can be used to pay for a taxi or water from a remote village’s well. Electricity is sold on a pay-as-you-go basis in
Kenya, and a startup there lets people buy prepaid cards and authorize them using their phone. Thirty percent of the population now pays that way, instead of standing in line.

Eagle’s system uses text messages or a low bandwidth, interactive protocol known as USSD
(typically used to check prepaid phone balances). Participants get paid in small blocks of money or in chunks of airtime.

Kenyans in the trial — security guards, taxi drivers and high school students — have already translated more than 15 local languages into English for Nokia, which will use the results to make phone menus.

Now Eagle is in California trying to find tasks that can be broken down into small chunks and sent to people in Kenya. He’s also got partnerships lined up to deploy Txteagle in the Dominican Republic and Rwanda.

He’s convinced that the platform will work and has algorithms that tell companies how they can be 95 percent sure their answers are right. Still, he admits that the real challenge will be in finding work that can be broken into little chunks.

Cheap airtime would let Txteagle tap into the medical transcription market — estimated to be a more than $15 billion industry that is dominated by outsourcing to India.

Already, Txteagle has found some cheap time is letting Africans call and listen to targeted radio ads and be paid for it, Eagle said, adding that it wasn’t as bad as it sounds.